Unused nuclear fuel rods stored in the Tarapur Atomic Power Station in Maharashtra for the last 40 years are posing a major health hazard to the local environment. Instead of reprocessing them, as several nuclear scientists have suggested repeatedly to the Indian government, it has baulked from doing so fearing international reprisals.
No scientist is willing to guess the number of fuel rods lying as waste but nuclear rods being used in heavy-water nuclear plants are understood to be changed every four months.
Tarapur Atomic Power Station is India’s oldest atomic facility and was built with US assistance. “We have 50 years of expertise in handling nuclear waste and yet we have allowed these fuel rods to pile up,” a senior scientist pointed out.
Nuclear reprocessing uses chemical procedures to separate uranium and the newly-created plutonium from the fission products. Scientists from the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) have, in frequent interactions with top-notch government officials, urged them to reprocess the uranium, which constitutes the bulk of the spent fuel material, as also the actinides, thereby potentially multiplying the energy extracted from natural uranium more than 60 times over. Dr Bharat Karnad, a nuclear expert with the Centre for Policy Research, points out, “The US does not want to take these fuel rods back and the government is afraid to reprocess them. Reprocessing reduces the volume of nuclear waste as also its radio toxicity because it allows for separate management of nuclear waste components.”
Interim storage facilities of these fuel rods is to keep them at Tarapur for some more years before they are shifted to a deep geological repository in crystalline rock near Kalpakkam.
But several senior physicists have been warning against the major problem radioactive waste poses because it requires hundreds of thousands of years to decay.